


Relief of the guard

by NotThatIWillEverWriteIt



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Haunted Houses, Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-08
Updated: 2018-07-08
Packaged: 2019-06-07 04:16:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15210794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NotThatIWillEverWriteIt/pseuds/NotThatIWillEverWriteIt
Summary: Across the road of their castle, stands the mansion half buried in the high snowdrifts. The house seems silentof course it does, it’s desertedbut the way one of its dead windows is peeking behind the snowbank makes it look like it’s watchingspying onthem.





	Relief of the guard

**Author's Note:**

> All these places and people exist in real life so I won’t name them. The story is my own, but I grew up in a small town in which there was a haunted mansion. I walked past it every time I went to my best friend’s. At first, the house doesn’t look that scary, but I still always found myself hurrying up my steps.

In a northern, faraway country there’s a small town of 1,700 people, and in that town there’s an old building from the 19th century. People call it “mansion” but it’s really just a small, rundown house barely standing and half of its roof collapsed. There’s a well-known rumor among the locals that the mansion is haunted, but the origin story isn’t quite clear. It’s one of those rumors people like to repeat without really knowing what they’re talking about to make their otherwise insignificant hometown seem more interesting to outsiders.

A young girl and her best friend who have both lived in the town their whole lives are playing outside. They have built a castle out of a big pile of snow, a mountain that the tractor had piled up next to a road, and are spying people going about their business. She’s never really understood this play, but her friend always wants to spy people. She’s kind of chubby and clumsy and hates running, and her friend always gets angry at her when people spot them because she’s too slow.

“This is boring, no one is coming,” her friend whines.

“You wanna go inside?” the girl asks hopefully. It’s starting to darken even though it’s barely afternoon. “We could play Doom.” Which means, she will watch while her friend plays. She’s not really good at games.

“No, I wanna – hey, let’s go check out the mansion!”

Across the road of their castle, stands the mansion half buried in the high snowdrifts. The house seems silent

_of course it does, it’s deserted_

but the way one of its dead windows is peeking behind the snowbank makes it look like it’s watching

_spying on_

them.

“I’m cold and my mittens are wet, let’s just go inside.”

“Come on, don’t always be such a wimp.” Her friend is already halfway over the wall of snow they’ve been hiding behind. “Let’s go before it gets too dark.”

Reluctantly she follows her but at the same time racks her brain for any believable excuses. But they all make her sound like a wuss, and she doesn’t want her friend to get annoyed at her again. By the time they reach the opposite side of the road, she’s given up on trying to chicken out. It’s just a stupid house.

“Maybe we’ll see the ghost,” her friend says and starts making her way across the yard. It’s deep, soft snow all the way to the front door, and her boot sinks in knee-deep.

The girl follows in her footsteps and almost loses her balance when the snow gives in under her foot.

“I don’t believe in ghosts.”

“No, no, I’m telling ya. My dad said a whole crew of, like, researchers once came and investigated it. The mansion is mentioned in some book about haunted houses of the country or something.”

“Whatever, it’s still just a story.” Not that she knows what the story is anyway.

When they finally reach the front door of the house, they are both out of breath. She almost lost her shoe in the snow couple times. Walking in such deep snow can be scary. It’s like wading in a lake when you never know what exactly is touching your foot. Feeling a branch under your boot is just as chilling as a fish brushing against your ankle.

“I think we can get through here.” Her friend sweeps powder snow off whatever has remained from the front door. Near to the ground, almost closed shut by snow is a hole in the boarding. She gets on her knees and tries to fit her shoulders through. “It’s a tight fit, though.”

The girl turns to look back. The road is there, and she can see their castle, too. The world that was not haunted is so close, yet so far.

“I don’t think I can fit there. I can just wait for you here.”

“You sure?”

God, yes. “Yeah, just…hurry back, okay? I’m honestly cold.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Carefully her friend starts to wiggle herself through the hole. Her thick winter coat gets stuck, but she keeps stuffing. The lower body is easier, and soon her boots disappear into the darkness so fast that for a brief moment, it looks like the house swallowed her.

“Ugh, it stinks in here,” she says through the door. “Okay, I’ll be right back.”

Tired the girl slumps down to sit in the snow. Or, with her feet buried mid-thigh into the white depths, it is more like leaning. Wind whispers in the pines that loom next to the house and a shiver runs through her when sweat begins to cool. The darkness is setting fast, and the gray sky hangs lower and lower.

She hopes she was an outdoorsy kid like all the others. They like riding bikes down muddy paths, climbing trees or big rocks and then jumping off, and games and plays with running and balance. They love adventures.

She isn’t good at any of those. She isn’t fast or agile. She is afraid of heights and getting hurt. Instead of adventures, she prefers the comfort of the indoors and the company of the adults. She is the kid who all the parents look at with pity and understanding while telling their kids that “it’s okay, people are good at different things”. Yes, different, that’s what she is.

The cold slowly seeps through her pants, and she sighs annoyed. How long is she going to take?

She crawls closer to the door and hollers into the hole: “Hey, let’s go already!”

No answer.

She reaches a bit deeper. “You hear me, let’s go! I’m freezing.”

Silence. In the semi-darkness, she can make out her friend’s footsteps on the light snow on the floor but not follow them very far.

She calls her name again, but the silence of the inside of the house swallows her voice as soon as it passes her lips. She pricks her ears to catch even the slightest crack of the floorboards or a shuffle of a winter coat, but there is nothing. The stillness is stuffy and oppressive.

“Come on, this isn’t funny! I want to go _home_!”

Fear begins to squeeze somewhere deep in her chest. It is that fear you can’t quite rationalize but which still lives, hibernated, right under the surface of your everyday life. Sometimes it shoots right through your system like an electric current when

_a slimy something brushes against your foot underwater_

you least expect it, and the adrenalin almost bursts your heart out of your chest. The survival instinct.

But sometimes it slowly oozes out between the cracks of your rational thinking

_it’s spying on them_

when you’re desperately trying to keep yourself calm. That fear is your brain fighting a lost battle trying to convince you that surely there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for all of it, and your imagination is just getting the better of you. Her friend is just messing around. It’s just a stupid house.

“I will never talk to you again,” she mutters and starts to worm herself through the hole.

It really is a tight fit. The sharp wooden edges press painfully against her soft flesh, and she’s sure they will bruise her. A splinter catches her jacket and rips a hole, but she keeps pushing. Almost through. She rises to support her upper body with her hands, but her butt hits painfully against the top.

She huffs and puffs but finally manages to pull the thickest part of herself through.

When she’s dragging her feet in, the irrational fear strikes out of nowhere. Suddenly she’s convinced that if she doesn’t get her feet in right now someone or something will clasp around her ankles and snatch her. Hurriedly, borderline panicking, she scrambles forward and pulls herself fully inside the house and backs away from the hole. A safe distance.

As if someone would attack her from the outside.

Gingerly she gets on her feet. The floorboards creak and give in under her weight. It’s dark, but her eyes are slowly adjusting.

“Okay, I’m in!” she calls out into the silence. “You got me, can we go now?”

“I’m here!”

Her head whips to the left where she thinks the sound came from. It was definitely her friend’s voice. But it sounds like it’s coming from farther away than would be possible considering the house’s dimensions. The mansion only has two or three rooms, and the walls are so full of cracks you could almost see through them. Yet her voice sounds muffled.

“Are you okay?” she hollers back and starts to carefully find her way towards the voice.

“Come check this out!”

She heads to the room on the left, and her brains are struggling to make sense of the signals the senses are wiring. It can’t come from there, it’s just a few meters away.

A bit clumsily she steps over the high threshold, and an odd warmness runs through her.

That’s weird, she thinks to herself. I’ve heard of cold spots but never hot spots.

The air in the room is thicker and stuffier like it was closed off from the rest of the house. Her friend is nowhere to be seen.

But there are no other doors than the one I just come from. There are no up or down, either. But I could’ve sworn her voice came from here.

“Where are you?!” she calls again.

“There you are. You fit through the hole after all?”

The girl spins around, and a relief beyond description rolls over when she sees her friend standing in the room she just came from. Where she had been or how the sound had traveled so weirdly, she doesn’t care. Maybe it was the wind, who knows. Let’s just get out of here.

“Barely. It ripped my coat.”

Wait a minute. She freezes. That’s…

“Can we please go now?”

That’s my voice. How…Where…I’m not saying anything but that’s definitely my voice.

With wobbly legs, she hurries to the doorway, but when she’s about to step over the threshold again, she can’t. It’s like there is an invisible, elastic…wall, or something. She tries again. The air-wall stretches a little under the pressure, but she can’t pierce it. Confused she feels what seems like thin air, like a mime artist. She can’t see anything, but there is definitely a rubbery something in front of her. Like a membrane.

“Hey!” she shouts and pounds the invisible wall with her fists.

She can see her friend in the other room, clear as day. She’s turned away from her, kind of looking back behind her shoulder in the far corner. She follows her gaze and lets out a surprised, horrified, but above all, confused exclamation.

Behind her friend stands a spitting image of herself.

It’s like looking at a mirror but not quite. It’s not a mirror-self, but herself-self. Or rather other-self, because she was herself-self. It’s wearing her clothes and talking to her best friend with her own voice.

“Hey!” she screams again and pounds her fists, but neither of them reacts as if they can’t hear her. The rubbery wall seems to absorb both her punches and her voice. It lets nothing seep through.

“Did you find the ghost?” her other-self asks.

“Nah, just a bunch of rubbish.”

“What did I tell you, it’s just a story.”

She watches as her friend plows the snow off the entrance hole with her hands and the other-self adjusts her – its – scarf and mittens. It even has the same movements and mannerisms as her.

“I better go first. If you don’t fit, it’s easier to pull than push.” Her friend lays down on the ground and starts to squeeze herself out. The other-self stares at her defenseless back while she wiggles forward.

“Hey, wait! Wait for me!” She pushes the wall with all her might, but all it does it to bounce back. “Let me out!”

_Quiet now. She can’t hear you._

A voice, as clear as if coming right next to her, speaks inside her head. She freezes in the middle of the pushing and looks up. The other-self is looking right at her, and she flinches back half a step. Her face seems expressionless, or maybe trying to read your own face is impossible.

“What’s happening?” she asks it, herself.

_It’s the relief of the guard. Finally._

“What are you talking about? What does that mean?”

_It means it’s not just a story._

“You can’t just leave me here! Let me out!”

_Don’t worry, you won’t die. You’ll keep watch until someone else comes. It might be tomorrow, next month, or next year, but eventually, someone always comes. Because it’s just a story._

“Let me out.” She presses against the wall and sobs. “Please, let me out.”

_I’ll give you a good life, I promise. Better than what you would have managed on your own._

“Please…” The sobs were uncontrollable, and she slides down against the wall. “Please…”

“Hey, are you coming or what?” Her friend peeks her head in through the hole. “I’m freezing.”

The connection breaks and the other-self’s face lights up in human emotions. She crouches down. “Sorry, I thought I saw something.”

“You did?! What, where?” She tries to push back in to take a look, too, but the other-self swats her away.

“It was nothing. A bird or something. Let’s go.”

“Please…” Through tears, she watches her friend’s face for the last time and her own boots disappearing through the hole on the door.

Then it gets quiet again.


End file.
